Insurtech Pilots and Pivots: Learning by Doing and Undoing

Incumbent insurers and insurtechs should read this article BEFORE undertaking trials, POCs. Do not start a trial without knowing there is a real and urgent problem to solve or without setting KPIs. Otherwise there is a grave danger of entering that twilight world of POCs that die on the vine or worse still never end.

"Brad Weisberg has a lot of piloting experience as the founder and CEO of Snapsheet, a tech-enabled outsourced claims service. Snapsheet has raised more than $50 million in funding and today has 70 carrier partners and more than 500 employees.

“Some [pilots have been] more successful than others. I think one of the key learnings that we’ve gone through is just early on finding someone internally who is innovative, who thinks more like an insurtech, who has the autonomy to go through the organization and make introductions and bring people together,” he said.

It’s also important to set expectations early on. “Get those KPIs [key performance indicators], even put them in a contract, so that way we all know what we’re marching towards because inevitably something will go wrong,” Weisberg said."

Andrew G Simpson Insurance Journal Oct 15th 2018

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Ideally, pilots should be undertaken as a way to solve a known problem, according to Chris Cheatham, CEO of RiskGenius, which uses artificial intelligence to review and organize policy language.
“A lot of times we see companies or innovation people get excited about our technology or other technologies and they want to figure out how to pilot it,” he said. “The problem is if you approach a pilot to figure out if you have a problem to solve within your organization, you’re probably going to fail; whereas, if you know you have a problem and you’re seeing if the technology can solve that problem, that’s the better recipe for success.”